Leo Valiani, Writer, 90, Wartime Foe Of Mussolini

By ERIC PACE

Published: September 20, 1999

Leo Valiani, a highly placed member of the Italian anti-fascist resistance during World War II who became an outspoken postwar senator, died on Saturday at his home in Milan. He was 90.

Mr. Valiani was also a journalist and author who for many years wrote editorials for the Milan daily Corriere della Sera.

A leftist and a member of Italy's Republican party, he was appointed a senator-for-life in 1980 by Sandro Pertini, who had also been in the resistance and was then President of Italy. As a senator, Mr. Valiani was vociferous in warning about what he saw as threats to democracy in his country.

He was an ex-Communist who had spent some years in refuge in Mexico when he became one of several emigre Italian anti-Fascists who with Allied help made their way secretly behind Italy's lines in 1943, by ''small boat, by parachute drop or afoot,'' as Charles F. Delzell, a Vanderbilt University historian, put it in his 1961 book, ''Mussolini's Enemies: The Italian Anti-Fascist Resistance.''

In 1943, Mussolini was ousted from power, and then the country surrendered unconditionally to the Allies. But troops of Nazi Germany swiftly occupied Italy's north and center, and Mussolini set up a puppet state in the north.

Later in 1943, the British Special Operations Executive -- Britain's equivalent of the United States Organization of Strategic Services -- sent Mr. Valiani across the unstable front between the Allied and Axis forces to Rome.

Then he moved quickly northward to work with a resistance leader, Ferruccio Parri, and with Milan's anti-fascist Committee of National Liberation.

Still later in 1943, as Norman Kogan, a University of Connecticut historian, wrote in his 1956 book, ''Italy and the Allies'' (Greenwood), Mr. Valiani represented resistance leaders at meetings in Switzerland with American intelligence officers, including Allen W. Dulles, who was then with the O.S.S.

According to Dr. Kogan, agreements were reached to send arms to the resistance fighters, who would in exchange give the Allies information and help Allied prisoners to escape. ''During the winter of 1943-44 partisan resistance took the form of strikes and sabotage in the cities, and hit-and-run actions in the countryside,'' Dr. Kogan said.

Later in the war, Mr. Valiani, a left-winger who had broken with Communism in 1939, helped coordinate Committees of National Liberation in Italian cities, and became editor of an underground resistance publication in the north.

He was born in Rijeka, on the Adriatic, which is today in independent Croatia but was then a leading seaport for the largely landlocked Austro-Hungarian Empire. In later childhood, he lived first in Trieste, also then part of the Hapsburg domains, and in Italy.

In 1930 he was sentenced to five years in prison for anti-Fascist activities in the 1920's. After his release, he took up journalism, working in Trieste before fleeing for Mexico.

In 1946 he was a member of the Constituent Assembly, a step in Italy's postwar political development. He is survived by his wife and son.